3 ms·

Anyone else somewhat weirded by current state of affairs that this sort of information is valuable enough to even bother selling... And that it actually happens

by Ekaros 2mo ago

Anyone else somewhat weirded by current state of affairs that this sort of information is valuable enough to even bother selling... And that it actually happens... It feels like some societies are in really weird place.

greggoB 2mo ago
I am very much weirder out by it, yeah. Seems some societies are just excessively desperate for some kind, any kind, of fuel for economic growth, to the point this is where attention is now. The term "post capitalism" being thrown around feels less ridiculous than it did in years gone past.
- usrusr 2mo ago
  Any kind of fuel for giving active investors that FOMO tingle which then forces the steamroll of index funds to blindly follow. I guess the appropriation "any sufficiently advanced stock market is indistinguishable from entertainment" doesn't quite stop at equating the trade floor with a casino. At some point, entertainment also becomes the modus operandi of corporations.
- hogs_get_fat 2mo ago
  Truth is even weirder. plenty of growth is possible but modern liberal democracy requires that all progress must be contingent on the production of enormous amounts of text that nobody would ever read. 3 years ago, the Wall Street journal covered a company trying to use AI to generate documents required for the approval of new nuclear reactor reactor designs, which sounds dangerous, until you get to the point where they'd cite 2 million pages as necessary for a typical application. [1] I don't need to explain why no individual or institution could read that, much less examine it in detail. I remember a rather funny question I found in a comment to that story - "How many pages of those 2 million could contain pornographic images before anyone notices?" It's obvious why companies are so desperate for training data - a text generator of sufficient quality is more conductive to the growth of the nuclear industry than any scientific breakthrough in nuclear physics. (And of course, if you want to prevent the development of a nuclear reactor by your competitors, being able to produce millions of pages of high-quality objections will do the trick.) And it's not just nuclear power. When it comes to stuff like building rail lines, apartments or power plants (both conventional and renewable), you'd find that the main bottleneck is the necessity to produce documents. And of course, many documents can be subject to judicial review - a process that consumes even more text. [1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-targets-nuclear-to-power-ai-operations-e10ff798 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-targets-nuclear-to-pow...
  - account42 2mo ago
    It seems reality is trying really hard to outcompete even the weirdest sci-fi dystopias.
    - Alive-in-2025 2mo ago
      Today we are living this dystopian life. Imagine you train an llm on all the millions of complaints that say comcast or some other semi-disfunctional company gets. Or police reports of accidents. Or suicide reports, or any of the endless human misery that is out there in the world. Even though I'm fortunate in so many ways to be in the west - even with the current destructive us government situation, the world is still full of endless misery that I don't ever experience. Like someone living in a war torn country, Gaza, lots of other places.
  - WarmWash 2mo ago
    Well that's why a plan can take years to be approved. There also is the liability angle, where no one necessarily reads the document until the document is relevant to some situation in the future. Then you better have that document on hand.
    - qlte 2mo ago
      According to the article, the “application” (which I imagine was also broken down into smaller pieces as they went back and forth to regulators during the review process) was 12,000 pages in total. The 2 million number is for “supporting” materials which isn’t really defined. It definitely makes for a better soundbite to claim millions. > its 12,000-page application had around two million pages of support materials.
budman1 2mo ago
How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI? 90% of e-mails and Teams communications are inane. Polite banter, "thanks for taking care of that, I appreciate it" "please route the forms to Janet this week because Bill is on vacation" "unit will be un available until the parts come in" . I can't see the intrinsic fact value of this kind of communication without screening it. And after screening, the gold nuggets would be minimal.
- breezybottom 2mo ago
  A major selling point of AI chat bots is for customer service automation. A clean dataset like this is a huge find. I'm not sure what you mean by "facts" or "gold nuggets". Training data doesn't need to be factual.
  - bigfishrunning 2mo ago
    It's better when it isn't, so that you have an easy skapegoat for the hallucinations!
- mr_toad 2mo ago
  It will have a different writing style from the average blog post. Maybe they just want to train an AI that sounds less like an AI. Or one that speaks in vapid management style.
- TeMPOraL 2mo ago
  LLMs aren't a database. They're an attempt at brute-forcing an artificial mind. The who and what aren't really interesting there, it'll forget most of such details anyway. What matters is the patterns visible in the text at various scales. How people write. Why they write. To whom they write, in response to what. How does e-mails about mistakes correlate with PDFs they're referring to. How people work with ticketing systems - like how, actually, a ticket plays out. The jargon, the acronyms, the vibes, the causal links. It's all in there, and it's another slice through the set of things humans do, to be combined with other slices already in the training data, and enriching the whole. (Something something we will add your distinctiveness to our own, you will be assimilated, ...) (Hell, the fact that it's all from one org would make it a great dataset to have in the open for sociological studies. I bet that today, aided by LLMs to sift through it, you could use it to map how information flows through a large org - how incident on the floor travels through time and layers of management until it reaches the C-suite, what of it survives, how it gets reacted to, how the reactions flow down...)
tiahura 2mo ago
Companies buying other companies files have been a thing since companies.

by Ekaros 2mo ago

greggoB 2mo ago

I am very much weirder out by it, yeah. Seems some societies are just excessively desperate for some kind, any kind, of fuel for economic growth, to the point this is where attention is now. The term "post capitalism" being thrown around feels less ridiculous than it did in years gone past.

usrusr 2mo ago
Any kind of fuel for giving active investors that FOMO tingle which then forces the steamroll of index funds to blindly follow. I guess the appropriation "any sufficiently advanced stock market is indistinguishable from entertainment" doesn't quite stop at equating the trade floor with a casino. At some point, entertainment also becomes the modus operandi of corporations.
hogs_get_fat 2mo ago
Truth is even weirder. plenty of growth is possible but modern liberal democracy requires that all progress must be contingent on the production of enormous amounts of text that nobody would ever read. 3 years ago, the Wall Street journal covered a company trying to use AI to generate documents required for the approval of new nuclear reactor reactor designs, which sounds dangerous, until you get to the point where they'd cite 2 million pages as necessary for a typical application. [1] I don't need to explain why no individual or institution could read that, much less examine it in detail. I remember a rather funny question I found in a comment to that story - "How many pages of those 2 million could contain pornographic images before anyone notices?" It's obvious why companies are so desperate for training data - a text generator of sufficient quality is more conductive to the growth of the nuclear industry than any scientific breakthrough in nuclear physics. (And of course, if you want to prevent the development of a nuclear reactor by your competitors, being able to produce millions of pages of high-quality objections will do the trick.) And it's not just nuclear power. When it comes to stuff like building rail lines, apartments or power plants (both conventional and renewable), you'd find that the main bottleneck is the necessity to produce documents. And of course, many documents can be subject to judicial review - a process that consumes even more text. [1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-targets-nuclear-to-power-ai-operations-e10ff798 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-targets-nuclear-to-pow...
- account42 2mo ago
  It seems reality is trying really hard to outcompete even the weirdest sci-fi dystopias.
  - Alive-in-2025 2mo ago
    Today we are living this dystopian life. Imagine you train an llm on all the millions of complaints that say comcast or some other semi-disfunctional company gets. Or police reports of accidents. Or suicide reports, or any of the endless human misery that is out there in the world. Even though I'm fortunate in so many ways to be in the west - even with the current destructive us government situation, the world is still full of endless misery that I don't ever experience. Like someone living in a war torn country, Gaza, lots of other places.
- WarmWash 2mo ago
  Well that's why a plan can take years to be approved. There also is the liability angle, where no one necessarily reads the document until the document is relevant to some situation in the future. Then you better have that document on hand.
  - qlte 2mo ago
    According to the article, the “application” (which I imagine was also broken down into smaller pieces as they went back and forth to regulators during the review process) was 12,000 pages in total. The 2 million number is for “supporting” materials which isn’t really defined. It definitely makes for a better soundbite to claim millions. > its 12,000-page application had around two million pages of support materials.

budman1 2mo ago

How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI? 90% of e-mails and Teams communications are inane. Polite banter, "thanks for taking care of that, I appreciate it" "please route the forms to Janet this week because Bill is on vacation" "unit will be un available until the parts come in" . I can't see the intrinsic fact value of this kind of communication without screening it. And after screening, the gold nuggets would be minimal.

breezybottom 2mo ago
A major selling point of AI chat bots is for customer service automation. A clean dataset like this is a huge find. I'm not sure what you mean by "facts" or "gold nuggets". Training data doesn't need to be factual.
- bigfishrunning 2mo ago
  It's better when it isn't, so that you have an easy skapegoat for the hallucinations!
mr_toad 2mo ago
It will have a different writing style from the average blog post. Maybe they just want to train an AI that sounds less like an AI. Or one that speaks in vapid management style.
TeMPOraL 2mo ago
LLMs aren't a database. They're an attempt at brute-forcing an artificial mind. The who and what aren't really interesting there, it'll forget most of such details anyway. What matters is the patterns visible in the text at various scales. How people write. Why they write. To whom they write, in response to what. How does e-mails about mistakes correlate with PDFs they're referring to. How people work with ticketing systems - like how, actually, a ticket plays out. The jargon, the acronyms, the vibes, the causal links. It's all in there, and it's another slice through the set of things humans do, to be combined with other slices already in the training data, and enriching the whole. (Something something we will add your distinctiveness to our own, you will be assimilated, ...) (Hell, the fact that it's all from one org would make it a great dataset to have in the open for sociological studies. I bet that today, aided by LLMs to sift through it, you could use it to map how information flows through a large org - how incident on the floor travels through time and layers of management until it reaches the C-suite, what of it survives, how it gets reacted to, how the reactions flow down...)

tiahura 2mo ago

Companies buying other companies files have been a thing since companies.